DELANEY HAD NO choice but to pick the first option. Because she certainly wasn’t prepared to find herself barbarically married tomorrow morning.
What else could she do in the wake of that kiss? Of that...hurricane that had swept her away before she knew what was happening to her, making a mockery of any weather systems she thought she knew before?
Her body was no longer recognizable to her. She no longer felt like herself, as if he’d taken her from the uncertain ground of learning she wasn’t a Clark head-on into the sea she’d seen out the window, shifting and moving and no ground at all beneath her feet. There were too many wild sensations simmering inside her. Too much longing.
As if all that was left of her—the only part of her that was her—was that blooming, near-incapacitating ache that suffused her as he left.
What would you have done if he hadn’t stopped? she asked herself after he’d gone and she was left to try to find her breath, her own ragged breath loud in the quiet room.
But no matter how many times she asked herself, it was always the same unsatisfactory answer.
Surrender.
Delaney tried to ignore the heavy heat that rushed through her every time she thought that word. Every time she imagined what surrendering to a man like that, stone and fire, might do to her...
What was the matter with her that some part of her craved that kind of immolation? She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted to lose herself in it, and then find herself there in his arms. She had the half-mad notion that it was only there that she might feel like herself again. Only there she might truly come alive. She wanted—
A servant stepped in while she was still standing where Cayetano had left her, clinging to the wall. Delaney was sure he must have been able to see how red she was. How disheveled. How off-balance. Though if he did, no trace of his reaction showed on his face.
“The warlord wishes to know your choice,” the man said with great dignity.
Delaney wanted to pretend she didn’t know what he meant, but that felt a bit beneath her.
“The first one,” she told him, trying to match his dignity with some measure of poise and grace—or at least calm. “Thank you.”
It was a month. A lot could happen in a month. He might come to his senses, for one thing. She told herself that was what she wanted. Meanwhile, she would use the library he’d mentioned to educate herself on what she’d walked into here. Not only about her biological family, but about the Arcieris and their castle, too.
She’d hardly had a chance to breathe, much less think. Her new reality had been thrust at her, and now she was in this strange and overwhelming place, and Cayetano had kissed her like one or both of them were dying—
You’re all right now, she told herself. Perfectly alive and well and yourself. You can start using your head again.
Relief flooded her. She pressed her feet into the floor beneath her, assuring herself that she stood on her own two feet, as always. It would cost her nothing to stay here. She could go along with Cayetano as long as it suited her and gather all kinds of information before she was forced to face the Queen who was, apparently, her mother. Or the Princess who had taken her place on this island—yet belonged back home in the Kansas that Delaney loved.
She told herself this was nothing more than a delaying tactic. And more, that she was in control.
Weddings don’t necessarily happen overnight, Catherine had said. No need to rush into anything.
That was what Delaney was doing. Not rushing.
After Cayetano’s man left, she moved away from the wall. She frowned at the feast still laid out on the table, trying to decide if she was actually hungry or just feeling the very real need to eat all her feelings. But before she could get to repressing with pastries, the original trio of female servants swept back in.
They carried her battered old duffel bag with them. They were bright and chattery, like three happy birds, and they didn’t appear to require any response from Delaney.
That was a good thing. Delaney was still having more trouble standing on her own two feet than she cared to admit.
“Are you well?” one of the women asked, possibly noticing the way Delaney wobbled.
“Jet lag,” Delaney said with great authority for someone who had never been on a jet before today.
But she knew it wasn’t jet lag.
It was that kiss. It was Cayetano. It was that part of her that thought surrender sounded terrific and why not go ahead and marry the dark glory that had come for her like a tornado, lifted her up and out of Kansas like she was Dorothy after all, and brought her here?
Because that’s what happens in books, Delaney lectured herself, though her attempt to sound internally stern was a bit stymied by all that delirious sensation she could still feel inside her, lighting her up. Real life is different.
Though it was, admittedly, hard to cling to her idea of what reality ought to be when she was standing in an actual castle.
The trio of servants threw open a pair of doors that Delaney hadn’t even known were there. She’d thought they were part of the wall. But it turned out that she was already in a kind of apartment, equipped with everything from her own kitchenette to a vast bedroom that opened up onto its own balcony that overlooked the sweep of the valley.
The bedroom alone, she was pretty sure, was bigger than the farmhouse.
The entire farmhouse. And the bed looked about the size of her vegetable patch.
She felt itchy. The whole thing—the pageant of it, the obvious wealth, the fact that there were servants who treated her with a sort of brisk deference—made her deeply uncomfortable.
A lot like she was coming out of her skin, she thought, as she was led on a tour through one beautiful room after the next, all apparently a part of her guest quarters. It was a far cry from the inflatable mattress on a floor that had served as the farm’s guest accommodations. All the smug paintings and complacent vases. All the self-aggrandizing rugs, so thick and pristine she very much doubted anyone else had walked across their intricate designs. Even the parade of carefully chosen colors seemed condescending to her. Who would ever choose a mint green? A pale yellow? Then anoint it all with gleaming gold and silver and sanctimonious furnishings?
She longed for the simplicity of her real life. The demands of crops, livestock. The inevitability of the seasons. Rain. Sun. Storms. Drought. Those were the things that mattered, not a castle on a mountain above an island she’d never heard of before. Not all these trappings of a kind of moneyed life she couldn’t even begin to understand.
Maybe she didn’t want to understand.
One thing she could tell she most certainly did not wish to understand was servants.
She’d never had a servant in her life. Clarks did for themselves or they did without.
“I know I’m not a Clark,” she muttered, before she felt compelled to remind herself, and smiled when the servant with her in the bedroom—flinging open curtains and doors and bustling this way and that—looked at her quizzically.
Maybe if she kept saying that, it would start making sense. And maybe if she did it enough, she would believe it.
And maybe you’re happy at the notion of hiding away here, researching and reading and distancing yourself in all your not rushing, because you don’t want to face the truth, came a voice inside her, tart enough to be her grandmother’s. You want to put off reality as long as possible.
What she wanted, Delaney thought then, was not to collapse on the floor and cry.
Because she was afraid that if she started up again, she might never stop.
Delaney squeezed the bridge of her nose until the heat there dissipated. But then she didn’t know what to do with herself. There appeared to be nothing for her to do but stand about as the women breezed around her in the overlarge bedchamber, chattering brightly as they unpacked her clothes and set out her few personal things. Her attempt to help was swiftly rebuffed with a laugh, so she...stood there near the gigantic four-poster bed that she worried she’d need a ladder to climb into, feeling awkward.
So awkward that it took her a moment to realize that they were speaking to each other, and sort of at her, in English.
“I thought everyone spoke French here,” she said.
A tad too bluntly, she realized, when all three women—who she was only now realizing were probably about her own age, a fact she probably shouldn’t have found so astonishing—stopped what they were doing and gazed at her.
“French, yes. Also, Italian,” one of the women said. “But the world is big and speaks more than two languages. So, also Spanish. German. And, yes, English.”
“I have a smattering of Japanese,” another woman boasted.
But the third one laughed. “Knowing how to say thank-you in Japanese is not a smattering,” she said. “It’s one word. Arigato.”
Delaney felt as if she ought to apologize for speaking only the one. But didn’t.
“Also,” the first one said as the other two glared at each other, “the warlord insisted that only English-speaking servants wait on you. It caused quite a commotion.”
“I’m not surprised,” Delaney said. “I can’t imagine who would want to wait on a farm girl from Kansas.”
All three women looked confused. They looked at each other, then back at Delaney.
“Everyone wanted to wait on you,” the third girl said, as if she didn’t understand why Delaney had uttered such blasphemy.
“It’s an honor,” agreed the second.
“You are to be the warlord’s bride,” said the first. Rapturously. “What greater honor could there be than to attend you?”
Delaney did not have an answer to that. Her body seemed to respond on its own. She told herself it was shame and horror, that thick current of sensation that coiled low in her belly as the words the warlord’s bride chased around and around in her head. She told herself her body was staging a revolt at the very idea.
But she knew better.
She remembered that kiss too well, and she knew better.
Still, she didn’t have a lot of time alone to sit and brood about it.
Because the three servants moved on from the awkward moment, getting down to business quickly. They unpacked everything from her duffel, and then examined it. Critically. One of them pulled out a tape measure. Another produced a pad and pen and noted down the numbers. And only smiled when Delaney asked why.
After they finished whirlwinding around her, they delivered her to another servant waiting for her outside her guest apartment. He wore a uniform that even Delaney’s untutored eye could identify as fancy. Fancier than the women, certainly.
And significantly fancier than Delaney in her jeans and T-shirt.
“I am the majordomo,” the man intoned.
Then waited for her to reply to that in a proud manner that suggested a bended knee on her part might not be out of the question.
When Delaney did not alter the position of her knees, or change expression at all, he sniffed. Then proceeded to take her on a tour of the castle, stopping along the way to point out objects of note, paintings of historical figures—most, if not all, of the Arcieris—rooms wherein great moments in Ile d’Montagne’s history took place, and, at every window, a detailed description of the view. What lands, buildings, villages were before her, their significance, how they had disguised their true purpose during periods of conflict, and so on.
It took her longer than it should have to realize that this was not a tour. It was a lesson.
She blamed the jet lag again, but once she caught on, she paid much closer attention.
And chose not to ask herself why, when she was obviously not going to stay here, she felt it necessary to learn anything about this place. She told herself she was listening so intently because this was, in its way, a story about her family, too. Who better to tell the story than her family’s enemies? After listening to a litany of complaints against the Montaigne family across the ages, she could surely only be pleasantly surprised by Queen Esme one day.
She took in all the commentary about the Montaigne line, filing it all away to look up on her own later. To see how the story changed depending on the telling. But she couldn’t help but notice that, somehow, she was also interested not only in the details of the castle they stood in, and the valley she could see on the other side of the windows, but of Cayetano himself.
Knowing the enemy, she told herself stoutly. That’s all this was. She was gathering intelligence, the way people did when embroiled in games involving castles and queens.
“The Arcieri family have controlled the castle almost without interruption since its inception,” the majordomo told her while standing in front of a portrait of a long-ago warlord, clearly taking great personal pride in both the image and the Arcieris. “They have been the heart, soul, and conscience of this island these many ages.”
Delaney could see Cayetano in the portrait of his ancestor. Stone and fire. Eyes like a hawk.
She could still feel his hard mouth moving on hers.
“It does make a person question what the royal family actually wants, though, doesn’t it?” she asked.
The majordomo looked at her as if he’d never heard such blasphemy. “It is abundantly clear that what the Montaignes want is power.”
Delaney nodded at him. “But if this one family—” my family, she thought, to try to get used to it “—has been the problem for generations, why didn’t they just take out the family instead of all these wars and skirmishes and whatever else?”
The way the man looked at her reminded her that she was standing there in another gleaming room, this one a gallery, with the smell of the farm all over her. In her T-shirt and jeans, which were as comfortable as they had ever been but really didn’t match her surroundings. And the way he was looking at her, she was tempted to look and see if, in fact, she was also covered in dirt.
“They have tried, madam,” said the man before, frostily. “They have tried and tried.”
“It’s really amazing, then,” Delaney said hurriedly, “that the Arcieris have managed to stand against them all the while.”
Them in this case being the bad guys whose blood ran in her veins.
When all she’d ever wanted was Kansas dirt and a long, fruitful growing season.
Her words seemed to mollify her companion, though the look he gave her was still ripe with suspicion. “It was not so long ago that we were certain the great cause was lost,” he told her, straightening the resplendent coat of his uniform as if it had somehow become imperfect during this lesson. When it had not. “Our current warlord’s parents...” But he stopped himself. “I do not wish to speak out of turn.”
Delaney wanted nothing more than for him to speak out of turn. At length.
Because she was buying time and collecting information, she assured herself. That little leap inside at the mention of Cayetano was nothing to worry about. Maybe it was heartburn after whatever she’d eaten earlier. She’d never had heartburn before, ever, but these were extraordinary circumstances. If it persisted, she thought as serenely as she could, she would have to ask for the warlord version of antacids.
“It is only history, surely,” she said mildly now, keeping her eyes on the picture of the historical warlord before her. He was very impressive, but not as impressive as the current version. But she was quite sure that if she showed even the slightest bit of prurient interest, the already-not-so-sure-about-her majordomo would go silent altogether.
She must have showed the appropriate amount of respectful disinterest, because he continued. “Our warlord’s father died when he was quite young and Cayetano became the hope of our people. But for a time it seemed that hope was to be dashed. His mother ruled our people in Cayetano’s stead, for he was underage. Some factions believed that she was Arcieri enough, having been married to the previous warlord, and could lead us where we needed to go. But then she considered remarrying, and things became more complicated.” He shook his head. “Her choice of a potential husband was no Arcieri. I will leave it at that.”
Delaney snuck a look at his expression then, and found it...troubling.
And she didn’t like that at all. Because all the things the majordomo did not say seemed thick in the air then, and it made her feel more sympathetic to Cayetano.
When she had no desire to feel the slightest hint of sympathy for him.
Not when she could feel the aftereffects of that hurricane, still kicking up a fuss inside her.
“That must have been hard for the warlord,” she said anyway. From some unknown place inside herself, where she was gentle and not the least bit stormy.
“Our warlord is a great man,” the majordomo told her, in unmistakable tones of awe. “What would bring other men to their knees only makes Cayetano stronger.”
She was still mulling that over when he delivered back to what he called her rooms with Ile d’Montagne history in her head and a strange worry for Cayetano in what she was terribly afraid was her heart, to find the same three servants buzzing around. They were laying out garments and if she wasn’t mistaken, that was a curling iron she saw being plugged in.
“Surely it’s time to rest,” she protested.
Because she had never been so tired. She wanted to droop.
This is maybe real jet lag, a voice inside suggested. Because it’s an actual thing, not just an excuse.
“Don’t be silly,” one of her servants was saying gaily. “We have to get you ready for dinner.”
“The warlord regrets that he is unable to dine with you this evening,” said another, with the kind of giggle that Delaney associated with memories of middle school. As if Cayetano was some kind of boy band singer.
“You will be dining with the Signorina instead,” said the third.
“The Signorina?”
Delaney didn’t know what to do as they swarmed around her, so she stayed still. She didn’t object when they started looking at her clothes as if they meant to remove them right there where she stood in the middle of the bedroom floor. Or even when they did.
She was so exhausted and overwhelmed it didn’t seem real.
And they were so matter-of-fact about the whole thing that it felt perfectly acceptable, in this strange, unreal place, to find herself surrendering. They tugged everything off and whisked a silk bathrobe of sorts into place so seamlessly that she had the possibly half-hysterical urge to ask if they had choreographed it. Then they spun her around, making clucking noises as they sat her in front of a mirror in what she hadn’t recognized was a vanity table in the separate apartment that was her bathroom. Though calling it a bathroom didn’t really cover the many rooms, nooks, and walk-in closets that were each bigger than the farmhouse’s whole attic.
Delaney couldn’t really process anything, it turned out. So it seemed reasonable enough—or almost—to let someone work on her hair while the other two kept holding different garments that weren’t hers in the mirror’s reflection, then conferring.
Why not? something in her asked.
After all, she had a whole month. Surely she could effect her escape later—or rather simply leave without all the melodrama.
Not tonight.
“The Signorina is the foremost expert on manners and customs in the valley,” Delaney was informed. The girl applying the hairbrush and curling iron to her hair looked very serious as she said this. “She has dedicated herself to the Arcieri family. She has been the governess not only for the warlord, but for his father before him. It is a great honor that she has agreed to this.”
Once again, Delaney was aware that she was being studied. For her reaction.
She made what she hoped were noises that suggested she felt appropriately honored.
After they finished fussing with the hair she usually paid no attention to, or put into braids to really ignore, she was packed into a dress that was finer than any other single garment she’d ever beheld. It was soft. It seemed to whisper at her, little secrets about its own finery.
Delaney wanted to hate it on principle. But she couldn’t.
When they angled her so she could look at her full reflection, something in her...seized, maybe. Or went so still it amounted to the same thing. The woman looking back at her from the mirror wore a dress that belonged behind glass somewhere, maybe in Hollywood. The rope of pearls wound around her neck felt silky against her skin but looked impossibly elegant—a word that had never been used in reference to a girl who spent most of her life in dirty overalls. Never, ever. And it was all topped off with the kind of sophisticated twisty updo that made her look like a complete stranger.
She understood, then. This was a dream. Or it felt like a dream, and that was why she was simply going along with the whole thing, because that was what a person did in dreams. What did it matter that none of this made sense? It didn’t have to.
Because in a dream, it wasn’t necessary to check with her feelings of dislocation and despair on the one hand and something too much like desire on the other. It wasn’t necessary to untangle that knot. Or face this shocking joy in things she would have said repulsed her, like a pretty dress that moved around her legs like it was made of light. If it was real life, she would have had to square up to all the things that were happening to her and had already happened. In a dream, she might as well decide to give herself over to the sheer madness all around her without complaint. So that was what she did.
And a person who was wide awake might have objected to being marched down to what the majordomo had told her was the private wing of the palace, where she was shown into a dining room. But the dreamer in her simply went along with it.
There were only two places set at one end of a glossy table in this new room, packed to the ceiling with the kinds of priceless artifacts she’d been told so much about today, but what caught her attention wasn’t more vases and candelabras. It was the tiny woman with an enormous beehive hairdo who waited, peering at Delaney through a pair of spectacles.
Delaney had the strangest urge to curtsy.
When she wasn’t sure she even knew how to curtsy.
The doors closed behind her, and then there she was. Shut in yet another room in this castle, this time with a diminutive woman who emanated a certain intensity that made Delaney feel...
Well, unfortunately awake, for one thing. But also as if she didn’t quite fit in her skin. As if everything about her was wrong.
And she realized with a start that she hated it.
More than hated it.
Because Delaney was used to feeling personally comfortable in her own skin. She was used to feeling grounded. Centered. She knew who she was. She knew what her life held and would always hold.
She’d taken pleasure in those things. She’d enjoyed them.
And now she was standing here in clothes that weren’t hers, her hair twisted beyond recognition, while a strange woman eyed her down the length of a strange room as if she was somehow the problem.
“I take it that I’m supposed to be intimidated by you,” Delaney said.
The tiny woman moved only one eyebrow. It rose up, edging toward her towering beehive that made up the better part of her height. “Are you not?”
Her English sounded precise, but with a hint of an accent. Only the barest hint.
“I’m used to a farm,” Delaney told her. “The livestock does get a little fractious and plants are known troublemakers, but you learn to deal with it. But no, I wouldn’t say that I’m ever intimidated by posturing.”
She expected temper. Or more of that haughty affront she’d seen from the majordomo.
But instead, the older woman cackled.
“Marvelous,” she cried, clapping her hands together. “You’re wildly inappropriate and borderline offensive, and that’s what makes you perfect. This will be fun.”
She waved Delaney to the seat at the head of the table, still laughing, and settled into the other seat. “Come,” she urged Delaney when she hung back. “Everything must be quite strange to you here, myself included, but the food is phenomenal.”
And she waited so expectantly that Delaney found herself moving to sit down. Then, not knowing what to do with herself, she watched as the other woman rang the bell beside her dramatic place setting. Vigorously. The sound was still hanging in the air as servants swept in, laden down with trays of food.
“Tonight, we eat,” the Signorina said as Delaney blinked down at the array of utensils and piles of plates heaped before her. “We will concern ourselves with the stuffy rules of etiquette tomorrow.”
Delaney was shocked to find that she spent a surprisingly enjoyable evening in the Signorina’s company. It wasn’t until she was in her absurdly oversize bed, finally alone, that she remembered that she really wasn’t supposed to enjoy any part of this.
Why not? a voice inside her asked. Sounding a lot like Catherine, who was merrily not taking Delaney’s calls—the way she had the summer Delaney had gone to camp for one miserable week.
“You’re supposed to be trying to figure out how to not marry that man,” she told herself sternly. “Or at the very least, discovering things about the Montaignes. And therefore, you.”
But she dropped off to sleep before she could start coming up with a plan to do just that.
And as one day became several days, then a week, Delaney realized two things. One, that she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to come up with a plan, and she probably ought to think about why that was. And two, that she knew how Cayetano expected to wait out his month.
He’d put her on a schedule.
Because the days followed a sort of pattern. During the day, there was usually some time dedicated to wardrobe concerns and somehow this led to more and more items in those spacious closets that went on forever. And her three bright and cheerful servants never seemed to be able to find the clothes that Delaney had brought with her, so sorry, so they used the new clothes instead. They dressed her for every meal save breakfast, which she was allowed to eat in her bathrobe while they bustled around her, telling her what her day would hold.
Delaney told herself she hated these things, but the truth was that she quite liked the clothes that were picked out for her. She liked the hair, the makeup, which she would never have done for herself. She was getting more and more comfortable with the stranger in the mirror.
She told herself that it was in her blood, the inner Princess she’d never known was there.
Even though, if she was honest, her blood scared her a little. Maybe more than a little. Not the battles recorded in musty old books. She figured that was history. Packed full of events no one wanted to happen to them—but then, history was a lot closer on this side of the Atlantic. People here spoke of the fourteen-hundreds as if they were last Tuesday. What scared her was that the old books with the gold-edged pages weren’t filled with tedious facts she would need to regurgitate for some test.
They were records of things her family did.
Mostly to Cayetano’s family.
And she didn’t want to feel connected to either part of that equation. She was supposed to be having an adventure, not finding herself in history books. Especially not when what she should have wanted was to find her way back home.
But sometimes, late at night in her bed, she admitted another truth.
If Cayetano had kissed her like that in a “MIDWEST IS BEST” T-shirt, what would happen when he saw her like this? Dressed like she belonged here? Could it get better than a hurricane?
Yet even as she wondered about kissing him, she couldn’t help wondering if, for all his talk about healing the fractures on this island, he wanted to marry her because she looked too much like all the paintings she’d seen reproduced in his books. Of his enemy.
Sometimes the notion made her sad. Other times it made her shiver.
Still other times, she questioned why she was focusing so intently on Cayetano at all when her family tree was just down the side of the mountain...
Each night she would fall asleep resolved, planning to wake up and demand to be taken to Queen Esme. Because she wanted to look in the other woman’s face and not find herself there.
Yet every morning she woke and made no such demands.
Possibly because, deep down, she was terrified that what she’d see in the Queen’s face was the inarguable evidence that they were mother and daughter.
And she already had a mother. Even with Catherine’s blessing, it felt like a betrayal.
She spent the bulk of her time with the Signorina. There were usually lunches and teas, during which Delaney learned comportment and manners and customs, and, if it was only the two of them, dissolved into cackles more often than not. When there were others at these meals, Delaney practiced all of the above plus what the Signorina called the art of conversation.
“Everybody knows how to talk,” Delaney said the first time she brought this up.
“And all they do is talk,” the other woman replied. “Talking, talking, talking while the world spirals into wreck and ruin. Talking is not an art. It is merely moving your lips so that sounds may escape and collect them into sentences. What you and I are concerned with is conversation, which is not only an art, but a rather underestimated and lost one, in my opinion.”
“We’re having a conversation right now,” Delaney retorted.
The Mediterranean sun streamed down all around them as they sat out in a lush garden, tucked away in one of the private courtyards. Birds sang above them and bees hummed along merrily.
The Signorina set down her teacup and smiled. “And would you categorize the conversation that we’re having here as artful, dear?”
Delaney was forced to concede the point.
“At the sort of events you will attend in your formal role, one does not talk about oneself,” the Signorina told her, holding her teacup aloft.
That was how she liked to refer to Delaney’s supposed upcoming wedding. Her formal role. And maybe it said something about Delaney that she didn’t correct her—but this wasn’t the moment to talk about herself, was it?
“It is not the time for personal revelations, confessions, or monologues,” the Signorina continued, as if she could read Delaney’s mind. “None of that is artful conversation. That is what one saves for one’s diary or inflicts upon one’s intimates. The point of a good conversation is to engage. The point of the kinds of conversations you may find yourself in, with so many agendas and competing interests, is to entertain without revealing anything you do not wish to reveal. While at the same time trying to make whoever you’re speaking to reveal too much. It is very much like a dance.”
“I don’t dance.” Delaney brushed the crumbs of her scone off a dress that probably cost more than her entire previous life. She looked back at her teacher sheepishly. “Maybe that’s obvious.”
“It is one more thing you and I shall have to remedy,” the Signorina said with a laugh. “But first, we will converse, you and I.”
And the more they practiced, the more Delaney understood why. It wasn’t about the talking. It was a skill, and one she would be expected to use once the world found out who she was. She had no illusions that Cayetano would keep those DNA tests to himself. Whether she married him or not.
She had told Cayetano that she didn’t understand the point of pretty rooms filled with all that talking, but now she understood it was in those pretty rooms that a great many decisions were made about what went on outside them. The Signorina was merely teaching her how it was done.
Very much as if she really would be a queen someday.
Her stomach twisted a little more every time she thought such things.
Though she couldn’t quite tell if it was panic...or a complicated kind of excitement.
And no matter what it was, it never propelled her into actually doing something. She never demanded that she be taken to Cayetano so she could tell him how she would like to handle her family situation. She never took the opportunity to tell him what he could do with his threats of marriage.
The marriage the Signorina prepared her for every day, as if she wanted to make herself into the warlord’s perfect bride.
Sometimes she was tempted to imagine that was what she truly wanted. That she could let herself be swept away by his will alone, and let that be enough, because if she couldn’t go back to Kansas and unknow what she’d learned about her parentage...why not be the princess bride of a man who looked at her with burnt gold eyes, dressed her like a queen, and kissed her like a hurricane?
Maybe he was the adventure after all.
One night, two weeks into her time at the castle, Delaney walked to dinner with one of the servants. She knew all their names by now and knew that this one, Ferdinand, was far too overawed by the castle to talk much. She kept catching glimpses of herself in the various mirrors they passed, and it was different, now. Of course she had no intention of going through with anything like a wedding, or so she was telling herself tonight, but she no longer saw a stranger in her reflection.
She saw the future Queen all these people were trying—trying so hard and she didn’t always help, she could admit that—to make her into.
And on nights like this, she thought she could see it, too. She really could almost see it. Because that woman in the mirror looked as alien to a Kansas cornfield as Cayetano had. Delaney thought that really, she looked a bit regal.
She wasn’t surprised when Ferdinand led her into a new and different room this particular evening. The Signorina liked to keep things fresh, always moving to a new room, a new group, a new scenario. Training Delaney to stay forever on her toes.
Not that she cared to admit it, but she’d come to like the game.
Delaney was already halfway through the room, the doors closed behind her, when she truly took in the fact that the figure waiting for her tonight was not the diminutive Signorina.
It was Cayetano.
At last.
As if she hadn’t learned a thing. As if she was back in that dusty yard, mystified and too hot, his dark glory almost too hot to bear.
And that suddenly, she was nothing but a farm girl all over again.